Ramirez had a recurring nightmare about the fires in Iraq. The dream always began with the sensation of falling through choking blackness, and ended with the tumult of a helicopter crash. He would feel the heat and taste the sand in his mouth. The vision was steeped in a sense of powerlessness and its twin emotion, fear. When he had the dream in the years just after he came home from the Gulf in 2004, he would typically wake to a panic attack.
Dozing on the floor of his office, he had this dream again. He woke abruptly and needed a moment to remember why he wasn’t in bed. The floor was trembling.
“Quake,” he said.
From his window he saw a block of streetlights extinguish just before the trembling stopped. He would willingly trade a temporary, insubstantial panic attack for the concrete, troubling reality that confronted him. For a minute it seemed possible to fall asleep again, but a knock came on his door. It was Molton.
“Sir, we’ve got bad news.”
Ramirez stretched and smoothed his dress shirt; he was sleeping in his clothes.
“That’s such a surprise,” he said and took a seat in his high-backed chair.
Molton slid a document across the desk.
“USGS reports rising pressures in the Wheeler Ridge and White Wolf faults.”
“I don’t need a sensor to tell me that. We just had another quake.”
“The quake didn’t come from Wheeler Ridge or White Wolf. Those faults aren’t under L.A. They’re on the other side of the Grapevine, over the Tejon Pass past Lebec,” Molton said. “Forty miles from Bakersfield.”
Ramirez stared at the report.
Molton kept his eyes fixed on the mayor and said, “Felipe, parts of them are outside the quarantine zone.”
Ramirez spun to his feet.
“How? How did it get out?”
“We don’t know for sure that it’s out. There haven’t been any engine failures in the Central Valley. The fault pressures may not be a consequence of petroplague contamination. One of our scientists said the geologic changes in L.A. could affect the faults in surrounding areas. But…”
“But the plague might be in the ground up there,” Ramirez said.
“It might. And if it is, they tell me it’s unlikely it got there on its own.”
“A quarantine breach?”
“Possibly sabotage,” Molton said.
Ramirez headed for the door. “Two of California’s biggest oil fields—Midway-Sunset and Kern River—are near Bakersfield. Possibly a billion barrels of petroleum in them.”
“That’s a lot of plague food.”
“We have to shut down the oil fields, stop the drilling,” he said and lowered his voice. “But let’s keep this quiet. The President is concerned we may have a China problem. If the Chinese think we’ve lost control of the petroplague, they may take matters into their own hands. There’s a rumor they might use an electromagnetic pulse device to stop anyone or anything from leaving California and taking the plague with them.”
“We have to do something,” Molton said.
“Then get that scientist from Bactofuels on the phone. I want the cure the professor was working on when he died.”